Antonio Pappano, Superstar

​To Snape Maltings last week for two seminal concerts overseen by musical superstar Sir Antonio Pappano.
 
I have watched renowned orchestral conductors like Barenboim, Rattle, von Karajan, Haitink and many others strut their stuff in the concert hall, but no one has seemed to me to get right into the music like Antonio Pappano. His face and body contort and his jaw works constantly as he squeezes the very last drop of emotional musical content from each member of the orchestra. And as if that were not enough, he is also a wonderful pianist.
 
We were fortunate to get tickets for the penultimate and last concerts—Saturday and Sunday—of this year’s Aldeburgh Festival at Snape Maltings. There were pieces by Britten and Boulez—adjudged by me beforehand to be ‘difficult’. They were brilliantly performed and most thought-provoking; Britten’s seven sonnets of Michaelangelo sung by a superb Allan Clayton, and Boulez' Mémororiale. There was Debussy’s Images, a work for piano splendidly orchestrated by Colin Matthews, and Vaughn Williams’ On Wenlock Edge. And as hors d'oeuvre on the Sunday, Berlioz’ overture Le Corsaire; a real barn-stormer.
 
The real treats though, were the final pieces in each concert, Elgar’s piano quintet on Saturday, and Berlioz’ Symphonie Fantastique on Sunday. The Elgar, a most haunting piece, has haunted me for over fifty years since I first heard it in a shared student house in Wivenhoe when I was a graduate student at Essex University. I became aware of the Red Barn murder at the same time, so the two are forever associated in my mind and the Elgar always evokes mystery and an element of menace. For the performance, the string quartet was drawn from members of the London Symphony Orchestra (LSO) with Pappano playing the piano. I have heard the piece dozens of times in recordings—once live in a radio broadcast—but this was the first time I had heard it performed live. It was magnificent. The players bent and weaved as the music took them, and Pappano was crouched over the piano with his nose almost touching the keys at times. A truly memorable experience.

Symphonie Fantastique was always going to be the explosive finale, and so it proved to be. I have heard it many times and seen it performed live also at Snape, but this performance by the LSO and Pappano moved it into quite new territory for me. The Maltings concert hall seats 830 people and is thus both intimate enough for chamber music like the Elgar, yet sufficiently large for a full orchestra without loss of detail. So the double-basses do not get obliterated by the brass, and the strings are always audible even when the timpani and bass drum start their business. Controlling it all, just using his hands—his body performing contortions—Pappano seemed to positively drag the music out of each player. There are many crescendi in the piece, but as the finale drew to a close, it seemed to me that it just could not get any more intense. It did, and at the end I was an emotional wreck. I could not speak, I could not clap, I had tears in my eyes. Perhaps I am just getting old and stupid, but I have never had a reaction to a piece of music like that before.
 
And then, as if the overload could not get any more extreme, we bumped into Pappano and his wife leaving a reception at the hall, hand in hand, half an hour or so after the performance had ended. There was no-one else around, and I called after him and gabbled my gratitude for the splendid performance. I told him he was my new hero, “That bad, eh?” quipped his wife, who introduced herself as Pam. He shook my hand and my wife’s hand and was so friendly and pleasant and entirely without airs and graces, that it is difficult to believe that he is a knight of the realm and a conductor and musician of international repute. 
 
So, look out for Antonio Pappano, a consummate musician and performer, and a thoroughly nice person.